New Matrixism Following the 'Path of the One' to enlightenment

 Some time ago I read Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World".  Written in 1931, Huxley told the story of a future in which there is a totalitarian world government.  In this world, people are assigned their places in life and genetically engineered for it from the time of "conception"; a person who would work in a metal smelting factory would be given high tolerances to heat; a person who would be a regional administrator would be given high intelligence.  Through a rigid educational system that includes recordings played while a person sleeps, the populace is trained to accept what they are told and not to buck the system.  Liberal rations of a state supported drug, soma, is used to avert depression and unhappy thoughts.  A person's free time is spent performing some activity that requires the use of manufactured stuff; activities include movies with smell-o-touch-o-vision and sports that require elaborate fields, setups and gear.  To simply take a quiet walk, sit at the beach to watch the waves come in, and to even read a book is seen as odd and against society.  And anyone who is deemed to be anti-society is banished to isolated islands of like minded people so they can't infect the populous.  

Almost 30 years later, Huxley wrote "Brave New World Revisited" in which he starts by saying he thought the world he envisioned was far off in the future.  However, even in the late 1950s he believed we were rapidly heading towards it.  Having recently finished reading his thoughts on where the world was heading, it seems that even more we are headed to what he greatly feared.  Below are some interesting tidbits of what Huxley had to say about what he saw as our future.
 

 In the past few weeks I've started on several postings, but have deleted them.  I have a topic I'd like to talk about, but need to do more research before I can really go deep into it.  In the meantime, one of our long-time members has sent me an e-mail:

I joined Matrixism a long, long time ago, with very little information. A lot of the information I DID have, was wrong. I thought with the arrival of your new site, I could get a few answers, and I did, but I still don't know what it all means. What exactly is the focus of matrixism, and what is the belief? When I first joined, I thought it was just a bucnh of guys supporting the brain in the vat theory, but I know it's more than that. Can you please explain what it all means? 

 I fear setting a dangerous precedent by posting a second entry in as many days, but here goes.  At the end of this posting will be an update on the status of the site redesign.

Slashdot has an interesting story today "Video Gamers Have Power Over Their Dreams".  It says that Canadian researchers have found that people who play video games before going to sleep have greater control over their dreams than those who don't play video games before going to sleep.  This study was performed by Grant MacEwan University psychologist, Jayne Gackenbach.  In her various studies she found that gamers were more likely to have lucid dreams, dreams in which they were observing themselves from outside their bodies, and to be able to control their dreams.  This control over their dreams in further studies were shown that the game was able to control their dream selfs, but no one else in the dream.  You can read more in this article.

 Before I go into the intent of this discourse, let me apologize for my absence and lack of running of this site.  Life has its ways of demanding you to focus your attentions on other things.  For me, the focus was day-to-day living.  As a result, some aspects of the site went to hell.  I'm in the process of re-launching the site so to speak.  I hope people will come and offer their insights.  I'll do my best to stay on top of moderation and keeping things going.

Now then, if you'll excuse my jumping on the Lost Finale bandwagon it's interesting to see the similarities between the show and what we talk about with Matrixism.

You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're awake or still dreaming?    -- Neo, The Matrix

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real?  What if you were unable to wake from that dream?  How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?  --Morpheus, The Matrix

From Alice In Wonderland to The Wizard of Oz to The Matrix, literature is filled with instances where people find themselves having dreams they cannot differentiate from reality or wonder about whether what they are experiencing is real or not. At some point, probably many times, we have all waken in our beds with memories of vivid dreams that felt as if they were real as it was occurring. However, there comes a point in the path to enlightenment where we must look inside ourselves and answer the question: "Am I dreaming, even when I'm awake?"

The world appears to be engrosses in the potential for the latest flu virus to become a pandemic causing mass deaths world-wide. At the moment there are more than 44,000 news articles on Google for "swine influenza." There are concerns about whether to eat pork or not, determining what is a pandemic, and how to tell the difference between the symptoms of a swine influenza and the regular flu.

My question is, should we really care if it becomes a global pandemic killing millions of people?